New Features: Free Shipping, Stripe Enhancements and More!

As the old adage says: There is no such thing as a free lunch. But we say: Who needs a free lunch when you have free shipping! This release includes two new free shipping methods for your LightCMS online store plus more available currencies for Stripe and a whole lot more. Take a look below at all the details and the release notes for Release 2014.7.

Free Shipping: Discount Code

You can now create free shipping Discount Codes. Normal discount codes give your customers a set amount or a percentage off the total order, but the free shipping discount code gives the customer the option to choose a free shipping method at checkout.

Here's how it works: When a customer enters the free shipping discount code in the shopping cart's discount code field, the free shipping method is automatically selected for the order, and no shipping charges are assessed.

However, the customer still has the ability to choose a different shipping method at checkout. For example, they might wish to select two day shipping instead of the free shipping. All that's required to choose a different shipping method is to select the preferred method from the shipping dropdown list on the checkout screen.

Free Shipping: Product Variant

You can now also offer free shipping for a product variant. This results in no shipping charge for a particular product on an order, rather than no shipping charge on the entire order as the free shipping discount code provides. When a customer purchases only the free shipping product, there is no shipping charge on the order. However, if the customer purchases multiple products and only one of those products is available for free shipping, the weight of the product with free shipping is excluded from the total weight of the order, and the shipping charges are calculated on the weight of the other products.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you use a flat rate shipping charge and the customer buys multiple products where at least one product does not offer free shipping, then the total flat rate shipping charge is still assessed on the order.

Gold and Silver Support

In the past, LightCMS partners had to directly navigate through multiple clicks in order to access Priority Support (now known as Gold and Silver support). With this release, options for Gold and Silver support now appear on the LightCMS Partner’s user menu on the top toolbar. This provides easy access to the priority support screen from anywhere in the admin interface.

Additional Currencies for Stripe

For this release we've also updated the Stripe library which adds features not available in the older library. One of these features is support for additional currencies. Previously, Stripe was an eligible Payment Gateway only when the store currency was set to US Dollars. The new Stripe library also supports the following currencies:

USD (US Dollar)

GBP (British Pound)

CAD (Canadian Dollar)

EUR (Euro)

AUD (Australian Dollar)

CHF (Swiss Francs)

Stripe Credit Card Authorization

The updated Stripe library also enables you to authorize a credit card transaction without actually charging the transaction. To authorize a transaction without charging it, you must select "Wait until I approve the transaction" in the store Settings under Payments > Checkout . With this setting, the card will be authorized, but you must manually process the charge when you fulfill the order.

Increased Blog Post Title Length

Before this release, blog post titles were limited to 90 characters. Now blog post titles can contain up to 150 characters.

Flickr Social Icon

Sharing your photos is now even easier with the addition of Flickr to our Social Icons. To link to your Flickr account, go to the Advanced tab in your site settings. In the Social Media section, select the Flickr icon and add the link to your Flickr page.

If you haven't discovered them for yourself, these enhancements have already been rolled out and are live today, July 8th. Enjoy and watch for even more exciting enhancements and new features still to come.

Release Notes for 2014.7

New Features

Added the ability to offer free shipping through the use of discount codes.

The user dropdown list now provides direct access to Gold and Silver Support options for LightCMS Partners. Previously, links to these options were available only by direct navigation through multiple pages on the site.

Enhancements

Updated the Stripe library to enable the use of Stripe as a payment gateway for a broader range of currencies. The new library supports the following currencies:

USD (US Dollar)

GBP (British Pound)

CAD (Canadian Dollar)

EUR (Euro)

AUD (Australian Dollar)

CHF (Swiss Francs)

The new Stripe library also enables you to authorize a transaction without charging it. This option is controlled by the Transactions settings under Store > Settings > Payments.

Meaningful messages were not always displayed when a credit card was declined at checkout. The system now provides more detailed authorization failure messages when a card is declined in your store.

Previously, blog post titles were limited to 90 characters. Blog post titles can now include up to 150 characters.

Social Icons now include Flickr.

Resolved Issues

Form submission was sometimes slow when it was configured to email the website owner or the form submitter. Modified the method used for sending email to eliminate the slow form submission.

Made changes to improve search indexing when text elements are updated or removed.

If a website was configured to use a custom domain name and the customer used PayPal Express at checkout, the shopping cart screen was empty when redirecting back from PayPal. The redirect screen now displays the correct information for the shopper.

Blog posts are exported in the BlogML format, and the summary of the post is included in the export file. However, when user imported the file, the summaries were omitted from the import. Modified the blog import feature to fully import the BlogML formatted file.

The credit card payment option did not display when the customer had to pay only the shipping costs. Updated the checkout page to properly calculate shipping so the billing information panel is displayed.

Shipping amounts calculated by some carriers were not rounded to two decimal places. As a result, when the total order was calculated, the final order amount may not have been rounded to two decimal places. The system now rounds the order total to two decimal places before passing it to the payment gateway.

When users configured their websites to use Stripe for processing payments, the accepted credit card settings were left blank. Modified the system to now default the accepted cards to Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and Diners Club.

The account owner was used as the "from" address in any email communication regarding digital downloads. Made changes to use the store email address as the "from" address in digital download email communications.

If the store customer used a discount code which resulted in a free order and there was also free shipping and no taxes, the system did not save the customer's first and last name. Modified the system to save the customer's first and last name when there is no charge for the product, no taxes, and free shipping.